Mr. Kwak Joong-chol’s excellent article on the problems of interpreters (the Herald’s Dec. 21 Issue) prompted me to write this piece to express my agreement on many of the points he raised in that article and also to add some of my own views on the “incident” of Prof. Shin.



I intently watched most of the Korean television coverage of President Roh’ state visit to Moscow earlier this month not only because my profession called for it, but also because the Russian interpreter who translated the President’s speech and his dialogue whit students at the University of Moscow is a high-school classmate of mine. He made a short visit to Seoul before the President’s Moscow trip, and confided in me that she was to work on part of the President’s official schedule there, including translation for the President at the university.



By reading only local newspaper accounts of the so-called incident, I could grasp precisely what kind of gaffe the American-educated Russian literature professor committed except that she walked out of a state dinner after she fumbled on some translation of President Roh’s earlier remarks.



Certainly, what she did was out of protocol, for which she was duly to blame, but what I lamented more was the generally harsh tone of most newspaper articles on the incident without much sympathy for her. They appeared to overlook the many qualifications required for an interpreter besides his or her academic credentials, which Mr. Kwak explained in detail in his article. Some writers seemed to question even her academic credentiais or capability of understanding and translating Russian.



In this respect, I am full of sympathy for her. I do not know her personally but I heard from one of my journalist friends that he had seen her at one of recent Russo-Korean symposiums here, so eloquently debating in Russian with Russian participants that he did not have a bit of doubt about her fluency in the Russian language.



In addition, how can we question her academic records or the academic integrity of the distinguished American university that gave her a degree in Russian literature.



I agree with Mr. Kwak’s argument that one’s ability to speak a foreign language fluently alone does not necessarily make a good interprecter.

He then aptly discussed the stage fright and the awesome atmosphere of high-level international talks.



My profession has occasionally required me to work as an interpreter and I have some experience in that stage fright Mr. Kwak referred to.

It was not that I was merely interpreting for executives of my company or working on an interview for a visiting correspondent with some local political bigwig, and still I was sometimes subjected to stage fright.



I think, therefore, if there is anyone to blame in connection with that episode involving Prof. Shin, it should be our Foreign Ministry’s failure to have seriously considered her various qualifications as an interpreter other than her language ability or academic credentials. Mr. Kwak wrote that the recruitment of the interpreter for President Roh’s state visit was based solely on “documented credentials” and “they were not those for an interpreter”. This passage led me to assume that her “documented credentials” may have not included her experience as an interpreter at international meetings.



Speaking of my Russian friend, Dr. Yun M. Ryu, better known locally as Yu Hak-Ku, he is a Russian citizen, having lived there for more than 40 years after he was captured by the Russians as a prisoner of war in Manchuria during the final days of World War 11 in 1945.

This means he has been speaking Russian much longer than he has been speaking his native language, Korean. While in the Soviet Union, Dr. Ryu had few occasions to use his native language, Korean.



While in the Soviet Union, Dr. Ryu had few occasions to use his native language, and in fact when he first came to Korea last year, his Korean was rarely communicable although he now speaks much more fluently.

Besides his fluency in both languages, he is familiar with things in both countries and also has quite a bit of experience in international meeting where he translated Russian into Japanese and vice versa. To the contrary, Prof. Shin studied Russian and Russian literature in the United States where Russian is seldom spoken in daily life.



It is therefore totally unfair to compare Prof. Shin with Dr. Ryu in their ability to translate Russian into Korean or Korean into Russian. This is not intended to defend her for her conduct in Moscow but to shed light of the difficulties of recruiting qualified interpreters and the importance of training them, as Mr. Kwak exhorted.



A former Assoclated Press correspondent in Seoul, the writer now swings for Time magazine. Ed.